FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE Now Available

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE Announcement
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the
availability of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the
stable/12 branch.
Some of the highlights:
* OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1a (LTS).
* Unbound has been updated to version 1.8.1, and DANE-TA has been
enabled by default.
* OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.8p1.
* Additonal capsicum(4) support has been added to sshd(8).
* Clang, LLVM, LLD, LLDB, compiler-rt and libc++ has been updated to
version 6.0.1.
* The vt(4) Terminus BSD Console font has been update to version 4.46.
* The bsdinstall(8) utility now supports UEFI+GELI as an installation
option.
* The VIMAGE kernel configuration option has been enabled by default.
* The NUMA option has been enabled by default in the amd64 GENERIC and
MINIMAL kernel configurations.
* The netdump(4) driver has been added, providing a facility through
which kernel crash dumps can be transmitted to a remote host after a
system panic.
* The vt(4) driver has been updated with performance improvements,
drawing text at rates ranging from 2- to 6-times faster.
* Various improvements to graphics support for current generation
hardware.
* Support for capsicum(4) has been enabled on armv6 and armv7 by
default.
* The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to consolidate
TRIM/BIO_DELETE commands, reducing read/write requests due to fewer
TRIM messages being sent simultaneously.
* The NFS version 4.1 server has been updated to include pNFS server
support.
* The pf(4) packet filter is now usable within a jail(8) using vnet(9).
* The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add NVMe device emulation.
* The bhyve(8) utility is now able to be run withing a jail(8).
* Various Lua loader(8) improvements.
* KDE has been updated to version 5.12.5.
* And more...
For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the
online release notes and errata list, available at:
* https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html
* https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/12.0R/errata.html
For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please
see:
* https://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/
Availability
FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE is now available for the amd64, i386, powerpc,
powerpc64, powerpcspe, sparc64, armv6, armv7, and aarch64 architectures.
FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE can be installed from bootable ISO images or over
the network. Some architectures also support installing from a USB memory
stick. The required files can be downloaded as described in the section
below.
SHA512 and SHA256 hashes for the release ISO, memory stick, and SD card
images are included at the bottom of this message.
PGP-signed checksums for the release images are also available at:
* https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/12.0R/signatures.html
A PGP-signed version of this announcement is available at:
* https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/12.0R/announce.asc
The purpose of the images provided as part of the release are as follows:
dvd1
This contains everything necessary to install the base FreeBSD
operating system, the documentation, debugging distribution sets,
and a small set of pre-built packages aimed at getting a
graphical workstation up and running. It also supports booting
into a "livefs" based rescue mode. This should be all you need if
you can burn and use DVD-sized media.
Additionally, this can be written to an USB memory stick (flash
drive) for the amd64 architecture and used to do an install on
machines capable of booting off USB drives. It also supports
booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode.
As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB
drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this
should work:
# dd if=FreeBSD-12.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso \
of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync
Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.
disc1
This contains the base FreeBSD operating system. It also supports
booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built
packages.
Additionally, this can be written to an USB memory stick (flash
drive) for the amd64 architecture and used to do an install on
machines capable of booting off USB drives. It also supports
booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built
packages.
As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB
drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this
should work:
# dd if=FreeBSD-12.0-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso \
of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync
Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.
bootonly
This supports booting a machine using the CDROM drive but does
not contain the installation distribution sets for installing
FreeBSD from the CD itself. You would need to perform a network
based install (e.g., from an HTTP or FTP server) after booting
from the CD.
Additionally, this can be written to an USB memory stick (flash
drive) for the amd64 architecture and used to do an install on
machines capable of booting off USB drives. It also supports
booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built
packages.
As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB
drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this
should work:
# dd if=FreeBSD-12.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso \
of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync
Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.
memstick
This can be written to an USB memory stick (flash drive) and used
to do an install on machines capable of booting off USB drives.
It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There
are no pre-built packages.
As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB
drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this
should work:
# dd if=FreeBSD-12.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img \
of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync
Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.
mini-memstick
This can be written to an USB memory stick (flash drive) and used
to boot a machine, but does not contain the installation
distribution sets on the medium itself, similar to the bootonly
image. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue
mode. There are no pre-built packages.
As one example of how to use the mini-memstick image, assuming
the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like
this should work:
# dd if=FreeBSD-12.0-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.img \
of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync
Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.
FreeBSD/arm SD card images
These can be written to an SD card and used to boot the supported
arm system. The SD card image contains the full FreeBSD
installation, and can be installed onto SD cards as small as
512Mb.
For convenience for those without console access to the system, a
freebsd user with a password of freebsd is available by default
for ssh(1) access. Additionally, the root user password is set to
root, which it is strongly recommended to change the password for
both users after gaining access to the system.
To write the FreeBSD/arm image to an SD card, use the dd(1)
utility, replacing KERNEL with the appropriate kernel
configuration name for the system.
# dd if=FreeBSD-12.0-RELEASE-arm-armv7-KERNEL.img \
of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync
Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.
FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE can also be purchased on CD-ROM or DVD from several
vendors. One of the vendors that will be offering FreeBSD 12.0-based
products is:
* FreeBSD Mall, Inc. https://www.freebsdmall.com
Pre-installed virtual machine images are also available for the amd64
(x86_64), i386 (x86_32), and AArch64 (arm64) architectures in QCOW2, VHD,
and VMDK disk image formats, as well as raw (unformatted) images.
FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE amd64 is also available on these cloud hosting
platforms:
* Amazon(R) EC2(TM):
AMIs are available in the following regions:
ap-south-1 region: ami-024f703d85c3b1012
eu-west-3 region: ami-04243f83cbdff155e
eu-west-2 region: ami-019ecda9be40c3dc1
eu-west-1 region: ami-01fe4421da59ecb30
ap-northeast-2 region: ami-00714e1048e4f0d07
ap-northeast-1 region: ami-07b604cf5a1d2d2e8
sa-east-1 region: ami-05dd76ac6637fb42d
ca-central-1 region: ami-03bb92c67ff9aaf90
ap-southeast-1 region: ami-09f5032f4642114c0
ap-southeast-2 region: ami-0e0c8be22c4801d9b
eu-central-1 region: ami-01b35a0a834759fc1
us-east-1 region: ami-03b0f822e17669866
us-east-2 region: ami-0842e35b91bf08aa5
us-west-1 region: ami-0519471b49bca30b3
us-west-2 region: ami-04331586c79df8e01
AMIs are also available in the Amazon(R) Marketplace at:
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B07L6QV354/
* Google(R) Compute Engine(TM):
Instances can be deployed using the gcloud utility:
% gcloud compute instances create INSTANCE \
--image freebsd-12-0-release-amd64 \
--image-project=freebsd-org-cloud-dev
% gcloud compute ssh INSTANCE
Replace INSTANCE with the name of the Google Compute Engine instance.
FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE will also available in the
Google Compute Engine(TM) Marketplace once they have completed
third-party specific validation at:
https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/browse?filter=category:os&filter=price:free
* Hashicorp/Atlas(R) Vagrant(TM):
Instances can be deployed using the vagrant utility:
% vagrant init freebsd/FreeBSD-12.0-RELEASE
% vagrant up
Download
FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE may be downloaded via https from the following site:
* https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/12.0/
FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE virtual machine images may be downloaded